Hero Quotes - page 77
Long ago I yearned to be a hero without knowing, in truth, what a hero was. Now, perhaps, I understand it a little better. A grower of turnips or a shaper of clay, a Commot farmer or a king - every man is a hero if he strives more for others than for himself alone. Once,” he added, "you told me that the seeking counts more than the finding. So, too, must the striving count more than the gain.
"Once, I hoped for a glorious destiny,” Taran went on, smiling at his own memory. "That dream has vanished with my childhood; and though a pleasant dream it was fit only for a child. I am well content as an Assistant Pig-Keeper.
Lloyd Alexander
In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours.
John Galt
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
John Galt
When I was seventeen I read everything by Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke, and the early writings of Theodore Sturgeon and Van Vogt - all the people who appeared in Astounding Science Fiction - but my big science-fiction influences are H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. I've found that I'm a lot like Verne - a writer of moral fables, an instructor in the humanities. He believes the human being is in a strange situation in a very strange world, and he believes that we can triumph by behaving morally. His hero Nemo - who in a way is the flip side of Melville's madman, Ahab - goes about the world taking weapons away from people to instruct them toward peace.
Ray Bradbury
As was sure, sooner or later, to happen, Adams one day met Charles Sumner on the street, and instantly stopped to greet him. As though eight years of broken ties were the natural course of friendship, Sumner at once, after an exclamation of surprise, dropped back into the relation of hero to the school boy. Adams enjoyed accepting it. He was then thirty years old and Sumner was fifty-seven; he had seen more of the world than Sumner ever dreamed of, and he felt a sort of amused curiosity to be treated once more as a child. At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter, and in this case it bristled with thorns.
Henry Adams
Many U.S. troops occupy countries that are no threat to the U.S. and many innocent civilians have been killed. I don't find that heroic at all. But most "grunts” are from poor, working-class.... So they believe the recruiters and join the military. I see most of the U.S. military as victims, not heroes. Of course, no one statement covers everything adequately.
Cindy Sheehan
I knew many homosexuals but I certainly didn't think of Batman in those terms. I thought of it in terms of ... Frank Merriwell and Dick Merriwell, his half-brother, who was the kid he was taking care of. ... In America we always talk about the Western hero and the pioneer kind of man-the Davy Crockett types-as being loners. They're never really. They always have a sidekick. ... Certainly there's no homosexual relationship. It's just part of the American syndrome. ... It was just that the author realized that you've gotta have somebody to talk to. Sherlock Holmes had Watson-were they homosexuals? Baloney. You just can't have your hero walking around thinking aloud all the time. He'd be ready for the men in white coats after a time. So we created a junior Watson and that's all [Robin] was.
Bill Finger
I have noticed that people have begun referring to Christopher Reeve as a hero. I do not wish to take away one iota of the courage he must have needed not to wake up screaming every single day, but the hard truth is there was nothing heroic in what happened to him or how he dealt with it...In fact, as far as how he dealt with it he didn't even have a choice. We could imagine he spent every hour of every day when not in front of the cameras begging family members to simply kill him and get it over with-but none of them did so he had no choice but to deal with each day as it came.* Heroism I believe involves choice.
*Not in any way suggesting this is what was happening, just in case there are those who are paralyzed from the neck up who might be reading these words... (2004)
John Byrne
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.Spirit, that made those heroes dare,
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I wanted to create a character who didn't routinely resort to violence and wasn't courageous by virtue of wielding a gun. I wanted to show someone who was powerful and incisive who could face down the bad guys without becoming a bad guy himself. I wanted a hero who was ethical, thoughtful, and just.
Joe Ide
Anyway, I was listening to Beagle answer a question on the panel, he said something along the lines of, "I'd never want to write The Last Unicorn again. It was excruciatingly hard, because I was writing a faerie tale while at the same time writing a spoof of a faerie tale."
I just sat there thunderstruck. I realized that's exactly what I had been doing for over a decade with my story. I was writing heroic fantasy, while at the same time I was satirizing heroic fantasy.
While telling his story, Kvothe makes it clear that he's not the storybook hero legends make him out to be. But at the same time, the reader sees that he's a hero nonetheless. He's just a hero of a different sort.
Patrick Rothfuss
The heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives on this country's soil! You are in the soil of a friendly country now. Therefore rest in peace. You are side by side with the little Mehmets. The mothers who send their sons to the war! Wipe your tears away. Your sons are in our bosom, are in peace and will be sleeping in peace comfortably. From now on, they have became our sons since they have lost their lives on this land.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
Ursula Le Guin has been a hero of mine for 20 years. She's done so much, and she will continue to do good even though she's gone. I honestly don't know what I would have become if it weren't for Ursula Le Guin. The first time I read "A Wizard of Earthsea" I realized how balance could be even more epic than war. Suddenly, Fantasy wasn't just wish fulfillment and grandeur, it was real and complex.
Hank Green
Of rhymes I printed seven volumes-
The list concludes John Murray's columns .
But then I only sung of passions
That do not suit with modern fashions;
Of Incest and such like diversions
Permitted only to the Persians,
Or Greeks to bring upon their stages-
But that was in the earlier ages
Besides my style is the romantic,
Which some call fine, and some call frantic;
While others are or would seem as sick
Of repetitions nicknamed Classic.
For my part all men must allow
Whatever I was, I'm classic now.
I saw and left my fault in time,
And chose a topic all sublime-
Wondrous as antient war or hero-
Then played and sung away like Nero:
The subject has improved my wit so,
The first four lines the poet sees
Start forth in fourteen languages!
Though of seven volumes none before
Could ever reach the fame of four...
Lord Byron
When a person has inwardly struggled with his anima or with her animus for a sufficiently long time and has reached the point where he or she is no longer identified with it in an unconscious fashion, the unconscious once again takes on a new symbolic form in relating with the ego. It then appears in the form of the psychic core, that is, the Self. In the dreams of a woman, the Self, when it personifies itself, manifests as a superior female figure, for example, as a priestess, a sorceress, an earth mother, or a nature or love goddess. In the dreams of a man, it takes the form of some-one who confers initiations (an Indian guru), a wise old man, a nature spirit, a hero, and so forth. An Austrian fairy tale recounts the following:.
Marie-Louise von Franz
Men who spend no time training the metaphorical muscle of masculinity like to believe that they would be able to step in and be a hero if some extreme scenario demanded it, but this is for the most part a fantasy sold to them by the entertainment industry. Men who work call centers and spend all of their free time watching television or playing video games are not going fight off any man who has experience with violence. They're not going to save the world, or their girlfriends, or even themselves.
Jack Donovan
Once, the men who ruled the world commissioned great works of art and public statues of bronze and marble to honor war heroes as exemplars of virtue- masculine virtue. Today's warriors are merely memorialized as victims of war, so that they can be regarded sympathetically by a society in which victimhood is a marker of moral purity and victory is morally suspect.
Jack Donovan
It makes me itchy, this wry fatalism, but it doesn't make me itch nearly as much as the heroes of so many other modern novels for whom stalking the savage libido is more fun than kinship or community; who will leave town either to find their callow selves, as if they'd lost anything important, or, more transgressively, to kill a bear, a bull, a whale, a unicorn, a hippogriff, a signifier or, preferably, their fathers.
John Leonard (critic)
